Sometimes before you get to being grateful, you throw a pity party. Your pity party may last a moment, a week, a month or a lifetime.
The dominant theme of a pity party is “woe is me, my life is horrid, and I’m the worse person in the world!” How do I know this so well? I’ve thrown a few pity parties in my time and according to my husband, “I throw the worse pity parties!” (Thank God for him). Life throws us curveballs, sometimes you may have a legitimate reason and other times you’re just down on yourself.
Job in the Bible had the ultimate reason to have a pity party: he lost everything he had including his wife and children, he got physically ill, and his friends weren’t really good friends – they thought he did something to deserve all this trouble. Ultimately Job acknowledged God’s sovereignty even in his trials – Job 42: 2-6.
In the end, Job’s latter was greater than his beginning – he had a lot in the beginning and he had even more at the end.
I recently read a book called Miles To Go by Richard Paul Evans which echoes the above theme. The main character loses everything and goes through additional suffering before finally realizing why. I like many quotes from the book, but these two I will leave with you – “For there are moments in all lives, great and small that we must trudge alone our forlorn roads into infinite wilderness to endure our midnight hours of pain and sorrow – the Gethsemane moments when we are on our knees or backs crying out to a universe that seems to have abandoned us. These are the greatest moments, where we show our souls. These are our “finest hours”. That these moments are given to us is neither accidental nor cruel. Without great mountains we cannot reach great heights.”
“I tell my children never forget that man is not a complete being in himself. There’s something greater than he that moves him.”
You are worthy. You may be going through, but so are many others. Turn to God and “Be still” and let Him work out in you what needs to be worked out.
May your pity party end with the clarity that you need so that you can move on.
Are your pity parties enjoyable? Do you wish you never had them? How do you move on from a pity party?